For well-being
Work-life balance is needed
Remote and hybrid work is bad for employee mental wellbeing and leads to a sense of social isolation, meaninglessness, and lack of work/life boundaries, so we should just all go back to officecentric work, claim many traditionalist business leaders and gurus.
Malcolm Gladwell said there is a “core psychological truth, which is we want you to have a feeling of belonging and to feel necessary … I know it’s a hassle to come into the office, but if you’re just sitting in your pajamas in your bedroom, is that the work life you want to live?”
The trouble with such claims by traditionalist business leaders and gurus stems from a sneaky misdirection. They decry the negative impact of remote and hybrid work on wellbeing. Yet they gloss over the damage to well-being caused by the alternative: office-centric work.
It’s like comparing remote and hybrid work to a state of leisure. Sure, people would feel less isolated if they could hang out and have a few beers with their friends instead of working.
But that’s not in the cards. What’s in the cards is office-centric work. That means the frustration of a long commute to the office, sitting at your desk in an often uncomfortable and oppressive open office for eight hours, having a sad desk lunch and unhealthy snacks, and then even more frustration commuting back home.
So what happens when we compare apples to apples? That’s when we need to hear from the horse’s mouth: namely, surveys of employees themselves, who experienced both in-office work before the pandemic and hybrid and remote work after covid-19 struck.
Consider a 2022 survey by Cisco of 28,000 full-time employees around the globe: 78 percent of respondents say that remote and hybrid work improved their overall well-being, and 79 percent felt that working remotely improved their work-life balance. Seventy-four percent report that working from home improved their family relationships, and 51 percent strengthened their friendships, so no problem with social life there. Plus 82 percent report the ability to work from anywhere has made them happier, and 55 percent report that such work decreased their stress levels.
Other surveys back up Cisco’s findings. A 2022 Future Forum survey compared knowledge workers who worked full-time in the office, in a hybrid modality, and fully remotely. It found that full-time in-office workers felt least satisfied with work-life balance, hybrid workers were in the middle, and fully remote workers felt most satisfied.
According to a 2022 Gallup survey, 71 percent of respondents said that, compared to in-office work, hybrid work improves work-life balance and 58 percent report less burnout.
Academic peer-reviewed research provides further support. Consider a 2022 study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health of bank workers who worked on the same tasks of advising customers either remotely or in-person. It found that fully remote workers experienced higher meaningfulness, self-actualization, happiness, and commitment than in-person workers.
Still, burnout is a real problem for hybrid and remote workers, as it is for in-office workers. Employers need to offer mental health benefits with online options to help employees address these challenges.
Moreover, while being overall better for well-being, remote and hybrid work do have specific disadvantages around work-life separation. To solve this problem, companies need to establish and incentivize clear expectations and boundaries, develop policies and norms around response times for different channels of communication, and clarify the work/life boundaries for employees.
As for other issues, the research clearly shows that, overall, remote and hybrid workers have better well-being and lower burnout than in-office workers working in the same roles.
Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is the CEO of the future-proofing consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts, and the best-selling author of “Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams: A Manual on Benchmarking to Best Practices for Competitive Advantage” and other books. He lived in Little Rock for a year while on a research fellowship.